Nikki Donadio [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap]t was a girl who collapsed on the soccer field. Girl, I kept calling her, with her pink headband and red soccer uniform. Dead at thirty...
Category - Literature
I Was a People Once
Ben Rawluk Some days, the sky running pink and orange like powder paint hit sharply with water, I perch on the balcony. I used to think about skinning myself, about there being something underneath, about all the ways my body could be modified or cut or altered. Now I think of dress-up, of...
Night Friends: An excerpt from the novel Candyass
Nick Comilla [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]his is what it’s like: I never know what day of the week it is. I get so down I drift through and feel up. We get so high we forget it...
Playing the Man
Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt The Gardener Below, leaves rustle and swish. The sound reminds me of an ocean, makes me crave a body of water that’s not a city pool packed with bobbing children. It takes looking at a map to realize Montréal is an island. Pinning my phone to my shoulder, I grip...
This dance is not optional
Emily Sanford This dance is not optional nor occasional: it is a rifle at the knees with a rattlesnake beat at high noon sometimes a precipice leap and sometimes a slow and sure-footed sway widdershins on sacred air— it is unending, blood pooled from a pebble in the insole, a fast turn about...
Fifteen (Lies from My Adolescent Mouth, a Selection)
Brett Josef Grubisic 1. “Nothing.” In answer to my father’s “What are you two doing upstairs?” (Simultaneously, my sister and I had the experience-based intuition that accurate replies—“Reading Vogue,” “Pretending to be Vogue reporters covering catwalk shows,” or “Designing and sewing gowns to...
Poison Hemlock
Penelope Evans [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]S[/mks_dropcap]ome kid thinks he saw poison hemlock up the trail, a good twenty-minute hike from the cabins. So I’m up there looking, even though...
Everything We Broke
Anna Swanson First glass The world was a gala in its first pair of high-heeled shoes. A spin of sweat softball hair and twenty-year-old tuxedos. Miraculous older couples who appeared once a year. The world was two hundred lesbians in a rented hall and we were our first pair of shoes and this...
The Quiet Revolution
Reece Cochrane [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]D[/mks_dropcap]ad hauled the family from Chandler to Baie Comeau the day after Duplessis finally died. Good riddance, Dad had said, reading the...
All Things Scarlet
Carter Vance Coming down with something’s case, fever flush of card suits taken too literal, whiskey-faced haggling with diner shop case radio dials, dusty countertop linoleum for a place to rest comforted hands; I am no longer in darkened rooms with chalk sketches or star charts searching...
The Word for Secrets
Lisa Baird The bleeding is supposed to stop once he goes on hormones, but it just gets worse. One doctor tells him, It’s like estrogen and testosterone are fighting inside you. He twists and spasms, medicates far over the recommended dose, soaks every towel in the house each month. You...
Nebula
Andréa Raymond [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]W[/mks_dropcap]ith studied slowness, Danny pulls our beat-up white van into the parking lot of Cullards’s Diner, another dubious stop on the Folk Music...
The Vertigo of Eros
after Roberto Matta Trenton Pollard I left the bed of another, did not make it back to yours. Jettisoned in flight from the tip of the dragonfly’s wing I drowned in flame-ripples. Searched for you in black boxes & floating pearls. You did not forgive...
Edibles
Sarah Thankam Mathews [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]V[/mks_dropcap]ic wants to make brownies but first needs a smoke. You stare up at the bright cliffs of books lining her walls. The ones she’s...
Girlhood
Nolan Natasha Pike The motorcycle jacket my mom brought home from Denmark, small enough for my niece now. Around the house mostly, never to school. Cindy and me punching each other on the hide—against our fists, the sound thick— and smoking too, in the backs of...
Without, With, Without: a Pastiche
Betsy Warland on the nipple of the city we watch clouds life off mountains slow motion bedsheet lovers barely breathing as the lips of night close the Henry Moore gleams cold and bronze pelvic bone maze we enter, lose one another in magenta murmuring we throb, sense each other rapping knuckles on...
Dania
Fawn Parker I should’ve stayed there in the halo of your gleaming macbook pro, your chastity plate, your voodoo object. But I got distracted, wondering how many times this has been done better to you before. Hard to believe just yesterday I was in the bathroom, my face smothered in rose clay...
Star Fag
Mitchell King I draw myself with smearing wrists unlifting and end up with three charcoal mouths talking into each other, leaving my body to her own devices; counting the brown hair on his forearm, counting the gray fuzz on his puppy-tongue, wishing to dissolve my identity in glitter and...
Pencil Head
Suzette Mayr This story is an excerpt from “Five Floors of Basement” (working title), a quasi-haunted-house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick...
Sour Beer for Bitter Hearts
Adèle Barclay I forgot about my necklace in your mouth but then we spoke so easily on a heated patio in the brightest dying light of the newest year. I was busy casting you as a sorry Justin Bieber but really you’re as handsome and persistent as a meme and I’m a soft space for your sad...
What Lesbians Wear to the Mall
Jane Byers A phys-ed teacher in Belleville, Ontario, who can’t come out invites me to do a lesbian “show and tell” in health class. The girls are quiet but fidgety while she introduces me, a picture of normal—chinos, pastel cardigan, Birkenstocks. Portray a boring life that is anything but:...
your white cisgender boyfriend can’t save you from the end of the world
Kai Cheng Thom even if he loves you, even if he knows how to love you well, your white cisgender boyfriend can’t save you: for all the strength you imagine into the curves of his arms, no matter how tightly you have taught him to hold you, the circle of his embrace is not a fortress, cannot...
Collaboration 3
Kay Gabriel i. Swam in a lake of it, got typically fucked Took stock of bathing coupons: half a chunk of trophy on display, the marble auction, from where the guests come in. On the right side the cradle of her thigh a mini world limned in that slit rounded, undraped, but fuller in the...
Limp Wrists
John Elizabeth Stintzi Now— Winnipeg, MB. Near Confusion Corner Winnipeg was once a wide world. Now wider than it seems, it is a cool spread thin. Now it is a hill of small favours, of small livings and hush nights and hard windows we view through. A city of voyeuristic perches perennial...
Drinking Sasparilla Root Beer at Donner Pass, 1999
Nat Marshik 1. I took an heirloom sip in thick pine needles, feet sunk in forest hands cool around the blue bottle with its flip top and old timey label and tasted with my twelve years the sweetsap pioneer story—fascinated by that emaciated winter, death in the high snows the icy unsympathy...
Stephen Was
Andrew Sarewitz Friendship comes easy for me. It always has. Love is a wholly different card game. When I finally met the man I felt was my life-long love in Stephen, I was sure and contented. At twenty-seven, it seemed like I’d searched an eternity to find the real thing. I had known who...
She Who Kneads the Dough to Lightness
Shelley Marie Motz I have been dreaming of bread. Warm and round. Buttered. Dripping. Dreaming of braided bread Sweetened with honey. My Greek neighbour Maria’s kitchen Steaming with daughters and laughter. I prepare the dough: Water. Salt. Yeast. One bowl. Two hands. Desire. I pour and...
Are You Jesus?
Ambika Thompson [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]I[/mks_dropcap] was making an egg salad sandwich when Charlie called over. I told him, before he could get a word in edgewise, that I had lost a tooth...
Naanwich Was the Last Thing
Kayla Czaga Do you remember the baseball diamond beside which we ate naanwich, Liz? It tasted nothing like butter chicken. We’d wandered all morning without eating and hunger revealed to us the aggression in nearby seagulls. I loved your light lisp, how softly you smelled of vegetable broth. I...
Our Longest Point
Greg Marshall Only after Dad broke his neck diving into the ocean in Hawaii did we start playing tennis together. Partly, this was a matter of timing. I was ten at the time of the accident; Dad was forty-two. More importantly, though, it was a matter of handicapping. It took Dad fracturing his top...
Meet the Author
Meaghan Rondeau 1999 I announce that I don’t want kids. My mom’s reply: “You’ll change your mind when you’re older. Life is meaningless—” She actually says this! I shit you not! Meaningless! “—without children.” Years later, I tell her that remark still bothers me. She says, “I never said that.”...
My Masculinity
Julian Paquette My masculinity is red and hot, excited and vibrant—a body that’s been too long ignored. An acutely sensitive organ of denial. My masculinity is tight and wants to loosen. I can feel the tension of repression against it. I can feel myself opening to my man. My voice lowering; my...
Excerpt: From Up River and for One Night Only
Brett Josef Grubisic Please note: The following excerpts do not appear consecutively in the novel. Déviation: Aptitude [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]W[/mks_dropcap] ith the exception of...
What Will Sustain Us through the Winter?
Esther McPhee i. It’s not spring weather yet but I want it to be. Winter’s lasted too long—I’m still not accustomed to the strength of east coast snow and I miss the rain, how February at home marks the first of spring, thaw of green frost and the crocus beginning. But here Joel starts...
Promoted to Glory
Christine Higdon [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]T[/mks_dropcap]omorrow, I’ll be the same age he was when he died. He was ten days short of seeing the first man on the moon. We six were...
fragments from the belly of the whale
Erin McIntosh they told me i would be like jonah, minus the comfort of speaking directly to god. i told them alright. all is well. stuck swimming in my own little world, waiting for the whale my saviour to scoop me up in his jaws, some man who could carry me to where i needed to be. i want...
I Lie on the High Line
Lucas Crawford I. I never went to the High Line or sucked transgender clit or dick. I never asked for three free samples at Milk Bar’s lower eastside locale; it’s just that I never find enough to lick. I never asked a stranger to pull over his car so I could take a hot dump in the woods. I...
Nipple Clamps, Vintage Porn, and A Guide for the Naive Homosexual: History with Illustrations
Brett Josef Grubisic A few years ago I got a mid-afternoon call from a friend. Originally he and I weren’t friends, not exactly; as strangers we’d made contact surreptitiously online and met for quickies on sporadic afternoons, work routines permitting. After a while the camaraderie flourished as...
Nephrophilia
Julian Gunn Lemon drops. Bitter torque. Al Pacino cruising for watersports. Born again by stoma, your new topology. A hole as always the gap of meaning. In medias res: Seattle. Nephrophilia. The scene in the basement. The old boyfriend pissing on the floor. A student of the body on hands and...
The Henry Moores
Andy Sinclair [mks_dropcap style=”letter” size=”52″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]S[/mks_dropcap]orry for the impersonal nature of this message but I wanted to let you all know that I am making a clean start! Dave and I have decided to...